


So Darkness I Became

by viv_is_spooky



Series: Down to the Root [7]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Character Study, Evil Scooby Doo Where the Hallway With Many Doors Wants to Maybe Kill You, Except Like., Exploration of Various Avatars' Relationships to Fear, Gen, Helen and Manuela Bonding as Various Avatars Run in and Out of the Corridors like it's Scooby Doo, M/M, Manuela Made Her Avatar Choice in Ny-Alesund, Reflections Upon the Past, Takes Place Directly Following MAG 143 (Heart of Darkness), The People’s Church of the Divine Host
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-23
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:35:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26616076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viv_is_spooky/pseuds/viv_is_spooky
Summary: Reflections of the High Priestess of a fallen church, on herself and her uneasy alliance with the Distortion
Relationships: Manuela Dominguez & Helen | The Distortion, Manuela Dominguez & The Dark (The Magnus Archive), Oliver Banks/Gerard Keay
Series: Down to the Root [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1792387
Comments: 19
Kudos: 17





	1. Coals of a Shadow Flame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If now isn’t the time to scream, Manuela doesn’t know when would be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song Recommendation: “Big God” by Florence + The Machine
> 
> ( _“Sometimes I think it's gettin' better/And then it gets much worse/Is it just part of the process?/Well, Jesus Christ, it hurts/Though I know I should know better/Well, I can make this work”_ )

In a brightly colored hallway with an undulating floor, Manuela fists both hands in her hair and screams until her ears ring with the sound.  She’s perfectly aware that no one can hear her; in fact, that’s exactly the point.

There have been so many times she’s wanted to scream, alone in the empty Ny-Alesund warehouse, abandoned by those she considered to be brothers, sisters, and disciples in Darkness. But she never had, lest the sound reveal to anyone nearby that the warehouse wasn’t empty after all.

Of all the emotions ever displayed towards Manuela, the one she hates the most - that makes her head burn with the coals of an extinguished fire - is  _ pity._

She saw it on the faces of the attendees of her parents’ funeral as false tears fell from their faces _-_ _ oh, the illusions one is forced to keep up under the garish, burning brightness of the sun _ -, as they clutched at her hands and murmured condolences that were somehow sincere and condescending at once.

She had wanted to laugh, to tell them why her parents’ death gave her the most vitality and hope she’d felt in years. She had wanted to make them afraid, to enclose them in their own shadows until they learned to love the divine terror of the Dark. Of course, she hadn’t had the ability to, not yet. So she’d smiled, trying to look stoic-but-sad.

That day had strengthened her resolve to embrace her own shadows and never look back.

Manuela had never wanted anyone to see her weak, shuttered in isolated, holy darkness for a year - rationing food until there was none left, starving until she found herself a creature of the pitch-black world she lived in (not human, not anymore).

If now isn’t the time to scream, though, she doesn’t know when  _ would _ be. Her life’s work, radiant in its defiance of light, crafted through sleepless nights aboard a spacecraft and laser-burned fingers, twisted physics and pure faith... it is  gone , destroyed by one gaze in a slow-motion instant.

So Manuela screams and scrunches her eyes against the harsh lights overhead, shielding herself against their glow upon her eyelids with one shaking hand.

How had she not recognized the unusual color of the door? Bright yellow, a mockery of all she had done - the color of the sun she worked to blot out for so long -, garish, taunting her through the hazy lense of memory.

The door is gone now, disappeared as suddenly as if it never existed, and she has a feeling she’s supposed to be scared.

She isn’t scared. She’s numb, shocked, shrinking in the shadowless corridor. With every ounce of power left in her body, ragged breaths shuddering in and out, she calls upon the Dark to ask for shelter in this strange domain.

She pulls upon her memories of when the ritual of the People’s Church seemed destined to succeed, when she was nose-to-nose with the full embrace of a complete absence of light. The fluorescent lightbulbs upon the ceiling of the hallway shatter.


	2. Devil You Cannot Know

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s easier than living in Ny Alesund. Being in the corridors, that is. Of course, nothing comfortable ever lasts for long in Manuela’s life. Not without some kind of failure or disruption.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song Recommendation: "Deep End" by Ruelle
> 
> Manuela: ( _“Where can I go?/When the shadows are calling/Shadows are calling me/What can I do?/.../Darkness is sinking me/Commanding my soul/I am under the surface/Where the blackness burns beneath“_ )
> 
> Oliver: ( _”It's getting close/I lose control/It's taking over/I'm slipping into the deep end/I'm in over my head/I can’t catch my breath/.../I feel the current within/I can't help but give in”_ )

It’s easier than living in Ny Alesund. Being in the corridors, that is. The creature who captured her, she learns, is called Helen – and Helen is remarkably understanding about Manuela destroying the lights in part of her corridors. She just tosses out an airy laugh that bounces along the walls, muttering something about “can’t trust your own mind in the dark.”

Manuela reflexively scoffs at that. The Dark has been the only constant in her life. What else _can_ she trust? If Helen’s plan is to drive her to insanity by keeping her locked in the shadows for an indefinite amount of time, it will, of course, _never_ succeed.

It is only when the first victim of the Hallways wanders into Manuela’s stretch of domain that she realizes Helen hadn’t been talking to _her_ with that statement. She delights in the way she can will the darkness to warp and twist into shapes here, to make the person scream, hear her words echo and distort and wrap around themselves as she tells them they will be Forever Blind. It is the first taste of holy Fear she’s had since the failed ritual to bring forth the Extinguished Sun, tenfold purer than the fleeting unease of those in Ny Alesund who wondered about the way she’d shifted shadows around the outsides of the old warehouse.

Of course, nothing comfortable ever lasts for long in Manuela’s life. Not without some kind of failure or disruption. In this case, she supposes she’s lucky it’s just a disruption.

Knowledge of her relative luck, however, doesn’t ease the intense flash of pain she feels when a trapped Watcher’s panicked silver eyes are suddenly staring into her own. She shuts her eyes against the harsh light, letting out an involuntary gasp that stops just short of becoming a scream, and the Watcher’s glowing eyes soften slightly.

“Oh, I’m…sorry I frightened you. Are you trapped here too?” A man’s voice, soft and polite as it is uncertain. Directly contradictory to the piercing gaze Manuela still feels boring into her scrunched-shut eyelids.

“Don’t _Look_ at me,” she hisses.

“I – _oh_.” He speaks like he’s realized something, and the sharpness of Watching intensifies in the air. Manuela grits her teeth against the building fear in her chest, but it’s an effort lost as soon as the voice of the Eye’s acolyte fills the air again – chilly and harsh, entirely devoid of the humanity that had previously laced through his words.

_“The blood is thick on your hands, High Priestess. What did you hope to achieve by holding those heads underwater? How would they look at you, your former colleagues and fellow academics, if they knew what you’d done? How those hands of yours still ache to force, to wrap around necks and sacrifice souls to stagnant, shadowed water in order to feed a Darkness by nature insatiable…it’s truly horrifying, you know. Claim all you want that you no longer care about their opinions; I See the truth, and –“_

“OLIVER! Oliver, are you in there?” A searching, panicked voice cuts through the stream of words pounding down on Manuela’s head. The Watcher halts abruptly, his head pivoting sharply towards the apparent source of the noise. Without a second glance at Manuela – whose head still pounds with the weight of the sentences that have been laid upon her psyche –, he rushes in the direction he’s pinpointed.

“I’m here!” he calls, tone once again soft despite the raised volume of his voice.

“Helen, let him out!” a second voice calls – a woman’s voice, commanding and confident with only the slightest edge of desperation.

“Oh come now, I’m just catching up with an old friend!” Helen, suddenly, is standing somewhere close in the darkness. Her presence elicits a gasp from the trapped acolyte of the Eye, and Manuela – despite the pounding in her head, and how her eyes still burn from being bored into – cannot help but let out a chuckle at his naïve surprise.

“If there’s _any_ of my aunt left in there, please let him go.” The woman’s voice comes again, and more desperation bleeds into this plea than the last.

There is a pause, tense and uncertain. Manuela, with nothing to really lose from either outcome now that she’s already been so thoroughly _fed upon_ by the Watcher, feels her breath catch in her throat as the atmosphere overwhelms her. “If you insist,” Helen sighs, finally.

* * *

As Manuela stands at the threshold of the newly-made door watching, the acolyte of the Ceaseless Watcher reunites with the two people who called for him. One of them, his own eyes aglow with the harsh light of telltale silver, greets the acolyte with a bruising, urgent kiss and then pulls him into a tight embrace, throwing leather-clad arms around his neck. They stand locked together, inseparable, forming a tower of faith akin to none Manuela’s ever seen before outside of the congregations of the Dark. Certainly nothing she’s ever seen in followers of the Eye – then again, there’s something different about these two. Their tower stays stable even when they open their arms to include the third of their group, a woman with thick waves of dark hair who is decidedly unaligned with any Power.

“Young love. Beautiful, isn’t it?” Helen sighs from behind her. Manuela can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or serious; it doesn’t matter much, she supposes, since Helen could be lying in her professions regarding any and all projected attitudes.

“You let him go.” She glances over her shoulder at the slightly-off face of the humanoid creature behind her, narrowing her eyes in challenge.

Helen hums. “He had something to go back to. You could leave too, now, if you wanted. I’m not stopping you.”

Manuela bites the inside of her cheek. On one hand, unknowable corridors, a devil she knows she cannot pin down but who hasn’t yet hurt her. On the other, two avatars of the Eye, locked in a strange camaraderie she doubts she will ever be accepted into.

With a quick nod, more to herself than Helen or anyone standing outside the threshold, she retreats back into the corridors and shuts the door to the outside world. The handle vanishes as soon as it clicks closed.

* * *

“That woman called you her aunt.”

“Helen Richardson was her aunt.”

“And you?”

“I’m not sure yet. I just know it would be... easier, if I wasn’t.”

“And the Watchers?”

“I sold them a house, once.”

“Ah.” The conversation makes about as little sense as Manuela expects any conversation with Helen to. Nonetheless, she thinks she’s starting to put the picture together as they sit side-by-side on the undulating carpet, shut out from the garish light of the outside world.

**Author's Note:**

> work title is from “Cosmic Love” by Florence + The Machine


End file.
